Posts tagged whats-in-a-name

Do your characters' names change depending on the race or class you're playing, or do they reflect your play-style as a whole? A recent article at Gamasutra by games analyst Anders Drachen explores the patterns that emerge when studying names in games.
Speculating that patterns in naming exist, Dr...

David Chateauneuf and Philippe Morin are both ex-Ubisoft guys who always wanted to make a horror game but couldn't while employed by the French publisher. Now the two have struck out on their own to form Red Barrels, an independent studio currently working on the Unreal-powered Outlast. We asked th...

Bernard Yee is the Aerospace Portfolio Manager for Bungie, tasked with helping the newly independent studio expand into digitally distributed frontiers. He's previously worked on everything from EverQuest at Sony Online Entertainment to Rock Band at Harmonix.
The name came about a couple ways:...

David Perry, Co-Founder and CEO of Gaikai, sat down with us during last week's Game Developers Conference: Online in Austin, TX. Over the howl of the expo floor's contemporary rock soundtrack, David let us in on Gaikai's mysterious branding:
"Basically one of our founders, his name is Rui Pereir...

Martial Hesse-Dr&eacute;ville, Dancing Dots Studio's managing director, explains how his studio came up with its energetic name. No, they're not fans of Dancing with the Stars -- turns out, the explanation is much more straightforward than that!
"I named Dancing Dots just for the fact that what...

Thekla, Inc.'s Jonathan Blow, creative lead of Braid and upcoming game The Witness, revealed the following Italo Calvino quote, from the book "Invisible Cities," as the origin behind his new dev studio's name.
"Those who arrive at Thekla can see little of the city, beyond the plank fences, the s...

Toys for Bob's Paul Reiche III, co-creator of the Star Control series and Pandemonium, lets us in on the thinking behind his studio's name.
Whenever you're putting together a studio, right, it's like name, t-shirt, and then let's do the contract. So Fred [Ford] and I had formed a partnership to...

While a raucous Starhawk multiplayer session went on in the front two rows of Austin's Alamo Drafthouse theater, LightBox Interactive creative director Lars DeVore spoke to Joystiq about the high concept behind the name of the studio formed by Incognito expats.
We sat around and we did the whole...

Dee Brown, Studio Head at Spider-Man: Edge of Time developer Beenox, gave us the origin story of the Quebec-based studio's name. Were any radioactive spills or gamma rays involved?
"When I was in high school, I was already thinking about creating my own games and starting my own development stud...

Johan Pilestedt is CEO of Arrowhead Game Studios, the Swedish developer responsible for Magicka. He recently revealed to us the origin of the studio's name and the meaning behind its seemingly dim-witted mascot.
Originally, when the studio was just a "student project," the group called themselve...

Mark Spenner is the vice president and general manager of Electronic Arts' EA2D studio, which makes smaller games with smaller teams. It's just launched Dragon Age Legends on Facebook and is working on an XBLA/PSN version of the Flash hit The Fancy Pants Adventures. Spenner elucidated the meaning...

Albert Reed is the studio director and co-founder of Demiurge Studios, the Boston-based team responsible for the forthcoming Shoot Many Robots and a mess of contract work with Harmonix' Rock Band franchise, Gearbox Studios' Brothers in Arms and Borderlands franchises, and many more. Reed discusse...